Cambronne is cut out in a week and flies to Bogota

Roger Lafontant had bought his place in the Duvalier hierarchy by informing on fellow student strikers in 1961. In the second half of 1972, while Simone Duvalier was in Miami, he convinced Jean-Claude that Luckner Cambronne was disloyal. Cambronne found the palace closed to him, understood at once what that meant, and took refuge in the Colombian embassy; days later he was in Bogota. Simone came home too late to reverse it and found her son unwilling to listen. The official explanation was that the president disliked some of Cambronne's businesses, in particular the trade in blood plasma drawn from poor Haitians and sold abroad. Hemo Caribbean shut its doors. The divorce law was changed so that both parties had to be represented, and fees from quick divorces were directed into the treasury, which conceded where they had been going. Jean-Claude then spoke feelingly about the need for morality in government.

Three sister organisations were founded in the early 1970s to carry the cultural work of the Haitian opposition abroad, all affiliated to the Marxist Patriotic Action Movement: Soley leve in New York, Haiti Culturelle in Boston, Vaccine in Montreal. The last is named for the bamboo trumpet blown in the Rara. Their reasoning was that reaching the Haitian countryside meant using Creole and the music of Vodou, since around eighty five percent of the population had learned what it knew through ritual song. So they kept the tunes and replaced the words. About 1974 in Boston the poet Koralen Jean Claude Martineau composed Ayiti demen on the melody of a well known song for Saint Jacques Majeur and Ogou Feray. They translated Jacques Roumain's Masters of the Dew into Creole for the first time and staged it with a live rooster and ritual drums, and their cassettes were carried back into Haiti.

The Caribbean Community was launched in 1973. Writing in 1997, Best asks whether the intellectual climate of the preceding years set limits on what the new body would attempt and achieve, in Georgetown, in St George's, in Kingston and almost everywhere else. His charge is that it gave primacy to relations between governments rather than between the peoples and islands of the region, and that it framed how those governments dealt with Cuba. He connects that to the near collapse of any working idea of sovereignty, regional or territorial. By 1994 the working slogan coming quietly out of Port of Spain was NAFTA at any price. Shridath Ramphal had by then invented the Association of Caribbean States as an invitation to the twelve English speaking members to widen their relations, on the theory that a Spanish speaking pond would teach them to swim. Best doubted they would swim, and asked whether the region had decided instead to drown.

Portugal answered the rising in Angola with force and held on longer than any other European power in Africa. The war that followed drew in everybody. The Marxist MPLA was supplied by the Soviet Union. UNITA was armed by South Africa, which wanted a movement it could live beside. The FNLA was funded by the United States once Washington decided that paying a rival guerrilla army worked better than paying Lisbon. When the Portuguese left, the country went directly into civil war, and by early 1976 the MPLA held the capital while UNITA still held the southeast. The three movements were more than foreign clients. Each drew on a different population, the MPLA on the Mbundu, UNITA on the Ovimbundu, the FNLA on the north, so the Cold War money ran along divisions that already existed and deepened them. Mozambique went the same way, where South Africa paid RENAMO to fight the government that had won the independence war.